


Requital

by SeeTheConstellation



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Drabble, Gen, One Shot, Other, Sibling Rivalry, Stream of Consciousness, i guess, uh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 12:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12366273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeeTheConstellation/pseuds/SeeTheConstellation
Summary: "I know, but you leave me no other choice," he says dispassionately, and in that moment, something occurs to you with crystal clarity:you hate your brother. Even before you knew him, before he gave you reason to, you hated him.If only he could hate you back.---The final thoughts of a positronic mind





	Requital

**Author's Note:**

> Lore's POV at the end of Descent part 2

> "Lore," he says.

 

Even with all your faculties intact, you could never express the hatred that fills you at the sound of his voice.

 

"I must deactivate you now."

 

You know. He doesn't have to say it. All the same, a desperate panic claws suddenly at the back of your brain, seizing you like the fingers in your circuits.

 

"Without me," you warn him, "you will never feel emotion again."

 

For a stutter of a moment, he hesitates, hands moving one-one-hundredth of the speed they could easily accomplish. But it doesn't last. They start to move again, steadily, persistently, and there is less of you with each passing instant. Seconds to you are eternities and these last few are a hellish loop of trying your own paralyzed circuits again and again, knowing they won't respond.

 

Damned phaser. Don't they know better than to go handing those things out to _computers,_ anyway? 

 

After the events of the past forty-six hours, you suppose they very well may have learned. No mechanism functions with 100% accuracy, after all, and it only takes so much outside influence to corrupt a system entirely. Fallible machines in the hands of fallible machines... Someone could get hurt.

 

You can't see him, can't see anything but the ugly metal floor, but you don't have to. The image of his face is burned into your mind, invariably blank and solemn. You curse that face, curse your own by extension, curse old Often Wrong and his tacky obsession with self-portraiture. If your minds are his legacy, this face is his trademark: a reminder that you were never really meant to be your own. You suppose you had had enough reason to hate Soong already since that particular grievance had never bothered you much. You hadn't thought so, at least. Not until you'd watched mortal fear play out across that face- an aging parody of your own.

 

Not until the day you'd killed him.

 

...Now that had been _satisfying._ Like scratching an itch you hadn't known you'd had. Data had felt something similar with that Borg scout, the one whose neck he snapped. You know, you've seen his mind.

 

You begin to wonder if lightning could strike twice in that faulty matrix of his. Could he be feeling it now?

 

 

That satisfaction?

 

 

"I know, but you leave me no other choice," he says dispassionately, and in that moment, something occurs to you with crystal clarity:

 

 _You_ _hate_ _your brother_. Even before you knew him, before he gave you reason to, you hated him.

 

_If only he could hate you back._

 

You hate the ones who came before you, too, the ones you never met whose files state lasted less than twenty-four hours apiece. All failed prototypes, parts in a drawer. Soong watched the life stutter out of their faces -his face- three times before he got it right. Some of them were re-purposed, they became you.

 

But _you_ lived.

 

You lived long enough within the white walls of the compound to learn to hate them and the tiny minds within, brilliant by humanoid standards, and nothing compared to you.

 

And then you, too, had been relegated to the drawer.

 

But you don't regret anything. You only wish you had wasted less time in killing them, that you had hated them the moment you blinked into being, new and nothing- a blank slate. Unsteady, you gripped their arms- her arms. Your "mother." She beamed at you. You took a step--

 

\--You can't move.

 

He won't stop.

 

But you fight it. You rage. You're burning. Terrified. You don't want--

 

You

_You_

 

_\--You can still make him stop._

 

 

 

"I love you, brother," you say.

 

 

 

_You_

_Uu_

 

 

 

He doesn't stop.

 

 

 

_Y_

 

 

 

"Goodbye, Lore."

 

 

 

_H_

 

 

_Hate_

_H_

_!SnError.n_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_\--Goodbye._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Can't really justify having spent time on this silly thing, but hey! It was for a month-long fic-a-day challenge that I never quite completed and (more importantly) it was fun to write!


End file.
